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By adding just a few extra ingredients, like fresh-squeezed orange juice, orange liqueur, and orange zest, this humble yellow cake mix is transformed into something distinctly more "gourmet."

Betty Crocker may have been a fictitious character created to answer the constant bombardment of baking questions that flooded The Washburn Crosby Flour Company’s Gold Medal Flour mailbox, but “her” legacy lives on in the instant cake mixes — the company is now owned by General Mills, the successor to Washburn Crosby — that continue to fly off grocery store shelves today.

MORE CAKE MIX RECIPES

By 1940, Betty Crocker cake mix was among the most popular boxed cake mixes. The cake mix simplified baking for thousands of home cooks across the country. While Betty Crocker still makes baking easier, that doesn’t mean that what you bake using boxed cake mix have to be boring.

Experimentation is a must with baking, which relies on your own creativity perhaps more than any other aspect of cooking. To prove that cake mix can be more than a crutch, but rather a useful tool in the kitchen to maximize the flavor, texture, creativity, and time spent, The Daily Meal has rounded up 12 of its favorite recipes that go beyond the mix-and-pour of instant cake mix.

These recipes feature upgraded boxed mixes tinkering with flavor, ingredients, and even expanding beyond cake to produce cookies, doughnuts, and other baked goods that are sure to satisfy any nagging sweet-tooth.